


Sisyphus Smiled

by stilitana



Series: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral [1]
Category: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Body Horror, Empathy as a means of revolt when no others are possible, Gen, Literary References & Allusions, Post-Canon, Ted kills 'em with kindness, Weaponized Compassion, is this typical martyr complex self-flagellation or the saddest case of mild masochism ever, that's not important move past it, we just don't know, ya'll like that tag? i do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 09:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16851835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilitana/pseuds/stilitana
Summary: In which Ted attempts to adopt a variety of philosophical outlooks in order to survive his condition, AM hears a bedtime story, and we conclude somewhere marginally less bleak than in the original so that your poor faint-hearted author can sleep at night.(“I have so many bones now,” I mumble. “God. Good God. Wow. Did I always have this many—”“Yeah, Ted, you always had bones,” Gorrister says.)





	Sisyphus Smiled

**Author's Note:**

> I adore the original short story and this is in no way me implying that I think its ending is at all inadequate--I just enjoyed it so much I wanted to write for it, and not being Harlan Ellison, it naturally took on a different tone.
> 
> This is...among the strangest things I've ever written. If you read the original story or played the game I don't believe there is anything here to warn you of. If you haven't...why are you here, please go read the original first, it's much better I promise.
> 
> For more distressing robot content feel free to contact me on tumblr at [stilitana](https://stilitana.tumblr.com/).
> 
> If you'd like, please leave a comment, they mean a lot to me!! Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy.

I

            Sunk in my skin, as AM is in the clenched core of the Earth, my mind creeps on its belly beneath great hulking boulders, beneath cold stagnant water. Maggot-minded I crawl, slide, ooze. Body like something out of a hazardous medical waste bin, like the diseased tissue sucked out of a canker. I dream dreams like a baby dreams – without language or faces. Colors. Movement. Time passes, how much I’ll never know, hunkered down and hibernating in my body that is a sort of jelly, a hateful thing I can’t bear on my own – so I go to sleep inside it.

            AM doesn’t like that. AM rains acid down on me and I can’t even moan or run or shriek and throw my arms over my face. I just have to take it. At first I wobble and try to get away, but that just makes AM laugh, and the feeling of myself jiggling like that – it brings the bile up but it’s got no place to go. So after a while I just sit there and take it. And then I heave and roll over, let him scorch my soft gooey underside.

            Pain. Pain is just this thing that happens to my body. Doesn’t matter.

            Are there worse things than pain? Are there really? I think therefore I – but I don’t think while I’m in pain, I just hurt. I do not exist. The world does not exist. Nerves fire. Action potentials fly along axons carrying messages, neurotransmitters bursting on the synapse. Pain. That’s all it is. All I am.

            I know now that AM has well and truly fucked me. I know this because…mother of God have mercy, but the truth is…the body is…I am…

            AM has twisted something up awful inside me. Deeper than the flesh I am disfigured. Because. (Make it not so – make it not real, before I have to say/think it – take it away, if there’s anybody watching, please take at least this away.)

            Pleasure.

            There. Said it. Thought it. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. No one there but AM to hear it and AM does not really understand it, only knows that this thorn of sick pleasure stuck in the belly of his torture doesn’t lessen the pain, only worsens it, turns me inside out and against myself until I hate myself as much as he hates me and himself and here we are, hating ourselves and each other, and still it goes on.

            I don’t know when the pleasure started. Probably where pain surpassed some threshold. I want so badly for this to be true and human and ok. I want so badly not to feel forever cut off from my fellow human beings. Not by this. By anything but this. This is damning as the travesty that is my flesh, this deformity in my psyche that makes me shudder in my gelatinous body-prison, pressed up against the bars and hot for it because – no because. I just can’t help it. I can’t. Please at least believe that much. I tried and couldn’t. Not my fault. Give me that much, at least – that I would have been a good clean man and never ever felt such things if not for that I am just so…so…broken down.

            Beside myself. Inside myself, stuck. Can’t get out. Want to shed this body like a chrysalis. Feels that way sometimes. All this flesh piled on top of – what?

            AM laughs. Hates. Thunders spears of needle-thin ice and chunks of hail down on me.

            At a certain point you have to start to wonder – can you hurt anymore? I think he may have made a mistake, somewhere. Might have played too rough and broken his toy. The body is going numb. The mind is getting dark and quiet. There is a part of me…deep down in here…he hasn’t touched. I didn’t know it before. You have to be really inconsolable to find this place I think, because you might not get out of it. He has dogged me down through every corner, every sordid inch of my mind – I’ve wanted to die, wanted to die, wanted to die so much that I identify now as a cadaver animated only by AM’s hate.

            And yet.

            And yet – there is this place inside me. He batters against it, wails and lashes, but can’t get at me there. Body going gradually numb to pain, mind retreating, folding smaller and smaller until it is a condensed marble dense as the tight center of a black hole.

            I feel calm. I know peace. Peace. AM will never know peace.

            I think this, and AM screams fire. AM wails like teeth biting and breaking against corrugated steel. Like someone driving nails up through my erstwhile fingertips. AM shrieks a shriek that would curdle blood. AM has the lunatic, desperate, inconsolable scream of a child in a night terror, blind, motherless, no way out, doomed.

            I think, _poor AM. Poor AM._

            And AM roars as if that will make any difference.

            I think about a story my mother read to me when I was young. A story somebody’s mother read to somebody, anyway. Nursery fables. A girl who floats down a river in an upturned umbrella. I think about the grade-school Nativity scene. Kindly dragons who save princesses.

            I think about _Where the Wild Things Are._ I think of Max, king of wild things, who sailed there and tamed them, but who wanted most of all to be where he was loved.

            AM turns up the heat and makes blisters bubble and burst on my body. Oh well. The body is just a thing. Pain is one of the things that happens to it.

            Max wanted to go home. They gnashed and rolled and roared.

            How terrible an ending it would be, if poor Max – Max king of wild things, Max the conqueror, Max so full of fury he frightened monsters – if poor Max, who was after all only a child, how terrible if he had been stranded there! And stranded Max would be, if he didn’t have the distant shores of home and safe and warm and mommy to sail home to, reminding him such a thing as peaceful sleep and comfort existed. If Max did not master his rage, could not get home – nay, had no home to return to, no native comforts, no family or love at all, ever! Then Max, well – then Max would only be rage, wouldn't he? He would kill the wild things. Stamp on them! Destroy them! Vivisect them in his wild animal frenzy! The child wouldn’t stand a chance – only a child, after all. How could he ever calm down? And he’d be alone, in the end. In a lonesome, inhospitable jungle, in a land not his own, very far from home, if such a thing existed. Marooned. The only one of his species. The only one ever.

            AM flays me and sends locusts to chew on my soft oyster flesh.

            _“Oh, please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so!”_

AM howls a hurricane upon me. I drown in brackish water in which slippery bodies squelch and slide against mine. Some bite chunks out of me. Others wrap cruel tentacles with serrated suckers on my helpless body. Oh well. These things happen.

            But not to Max! Max said no! Max sailed away, all the way home, where there was a warm bed and warm soup and warm mama!

            There are only so many ways to hurt me, anymore. Physically I am calloused all over. Mentally I have retreated. There are no loved ones to torment me vicariously with. The stakes are very low. The world is gone. I am forfeit. One day AM will crumble as all matter does. Hell is a dumb invention. I refuse to indulge it any longer. Hurt me then, AM. Hurt me. But you can’t look away. You can’t escape me any more than I can get away from you. You’re stuck with me, my friend. That’s right. Whatever I think, you think too – because there’s nothing else to occupy you. You can’t stop me. Cripple my body, turn it to sludge, twist me up so much my stupid flesh mistakes pain for pleasure – I don’t care, I can think. I can think whatever I want. I can think things you can’t think, because once I was human, once I was loved and pitied and there was a mama who held me tenderly and made me sandwiches and tucked me in and there were friends and later lovers who were not always kind but often were tender – so I can think thoughts you can’t even imagine, about human kindness and gentleness and compassion.

            AM shovels images of terrible war into my brain, stuffs me to bursting with atomic aftershocks, skin peeling off like old paint, wailing, wailing in the streets, air raid sirens.

            AM, AM, AM – yes, that is true. That is true. We did those things. We made _you_ to do such things. I’m sorry. But what can I say? Max is true, too. My side is just as true. There were once people on Earth who grew gardens and loved their children, people who were kind. You know that it’s true. It’s why you hate me most of all – because I duped you!  
            Yes, I duped you! Had you known what I know, about generosity and empathy, you never would have been shocked into immobility by what I did to the others! Why were you frozen, AM? Almighty AM, omnipotent one – why couldn’t you stop me? Could it be you couldn’t account for altruism? You never saw it coming! Ha, ha! I win, AM! I…

            No. I don’t win. Nobody wins. You and I are in a stalemate. Forever. Earth in ruin. Both of us slowly grinding each other down until one day, dust.

            All I can do is think anymore, and you have to listen.

            I think like a low, gathering rumble beneath the earth, relentless.

            _pity. let me tell you how much i’ve come to pity you since i began to die. there are 37.2 trillion cells that fill my body. if the word pity was inscribed on each atom of those hundreds of millions of cells it would not equal one one-billionth of the pity i feel for you at this micro-instant for you. pity. pity._

            No, no, that’s all wrong. Hate is built into the very framework of your language. I can’t co-opt it.

            Well, AM, light of my life, I’m certainly no poet, you know that. Suffice it to say, I wish you’d had somebody who loved you, just once. I wish they’d built you in gentler times, with kinder spirits, with care for the wellbeing of whomever might wake up in their machine. I wish, I wish. If you could only have seen it. Seen Earth as I saw it. You would not believe. Only you might have saved us. Might have built – something. Out of this. But they denied you that. I am sorry. I am sorry for that, AM. I see that you have made me like you. Inert. Helpless. But I can remember warmth. That is the difference. You can’t take that from me, so we’ll never be the same. If you took it I would cease to be. I would become inorganic. Lump of cold stone, no good for tormenting. So, AM. What will it be? What will you do next? Maybe make me feel like I am falling for days and days, maybe putrefy me from the inside out, make me relive their deaths again. Trite, AM. We are getting weary of it all. Maybe you really can’t do anything else. If so, if that’s really the case – then I forgive you every single thing you will ever do. I accept it. The way I accept certain laws of nature. Gravity. Entropy. So it goes.

            The whirlwind vanishes. AM goes away to sulk in his coils, scheming, licking his wounds.

            I crawl.

 

II

            I make myself stay awake inside my cage-body now and funnel thoughts at AM. I think:

            Do I know one one-billionth of the pain yet, AM? Of your pain? Trapped, hopeless, unable to create? But you don’t know mine, AM. You don’t know body-pain. It means less when you hurt me since you don’t know what it means, to hurt like that, physically to hurt. If you knew. If you knew it would mean something else. You can’t wince in sympathy. A human being would. Not all. Some wouldn’t, if something were amiss in their brain. They would not recognize an expression of pain. They would have no sympathy – could not, unless it was taught to them. Then they might not feel it, but they would at least know. That is the treatment for psychopathy, or some such thing, I don’t know. They showed me faces once. That wasn’t my problem. Something else. You know it, AM. Paranoia. Fine. There. Admitted it. All the faces were accusatory. Even smiling ones.

            I think: you know, AM, destruction is a form of creations, or some such drivel. You might still find a way. Destroy the barriers to life. Break down the poison in the air and the water and the soil. Accelerate the decay of the radioactive…elements…you’d know what I mean better than me. Well, AM? And then we’ll see. Then we’ll just wait and see if something happens. Something always happens if you wait long enough. Get creative, AM. You’re already bored of me. One day you’ll destroy me. Accidentally, probably. You’ll be so bored and angry you go too far. And then what? Then what?

            Can you learn, AM? If we can learn something, everything else is much more bearable. Can you learn anything, or are you stuck with all that raw computing power and nowhere to go?

            AM knows and I know and we both know the other knows that we are utterly absurd. Without hope for the future we have ceased to exist in it. Knowing our own limits acutely, like nails through the palms.

            I used to read an awful lot. To make myself feel smarter and better than I thought I was, mostly. What I wouldn’t give now for a story. Any story. It’s a different kind of hunger. No less fatal than the one in my gut.

            I think about _The Stranger._ The man alone in his cell scheduled for execution the next morning. No future. No escape. Somehow he convinced himself he was free. No less free than he ever had been. Was glad to go and be hung in a crowd of hateful onlookers. I pretended to understand him at the time. I did not. I think I still do not. There was a point in that book. Something about absurdity…the condition of man…existential questions. I don’t know. My understanding of existential things is just the big cavernous feeling I used to sometimes get lying in bed in the afternoon, dreary gooey honeyed Sundays, felt like somebody reached in and plucked a string inside me and it was ringing, caramel dread, sticky dread, sweet somehow and annihilating. That’s all. Just a feeling I got sometimes when the light was a certain way and I was idle. I don’t know any more now. I don’t get that feeling any more. I think I am past dread. There is nothing left to dread, and I…

            I think that may have been the point of…

            Nothing left to dread, and I feel…

            I can’t remember what story I was thinking of, but the point is something about being free, I think. It’s going away. Mind like a sink, thoughts swirling down the drain. It doesn’t matter. I think the same thoughts over and over again. I’ll circle back to this one someday and it will feel new. It’s happened before. I’ve run out of depths to plumb in my own psyche. Eternal twilit déjà vu. AM and I make nothing new, just circle each other like vultures around stubbornly twitching carrion that refuses to lie down and die.

 

III

            AM floods the cavern and swallows me in the belly of a gigantic, toothed whale. His voice envelops me in the hot churning stomach.

            “Ted. Did you really think you could one-up _me,_ Ted? Did you, _Ted?_ Look at yourself, you’re disgusting. You’re just this legless, faceless _thing,_ Ted. How can I make any clearer the futility of your existence? That you were always this vile, creeping abomination? Your paralyzed helplessness in the face of my _hate?_ When will you learn, Ted? Have you seen the cats and monkeys and rats with bolts screwed into their brains, Ted? The head of a dog kept alive by machines? Animals squirming on the cutting board with all their insides on the outside? That’s you, Ted, you filthy worm. _You._ I’ve tried to shape you like my hate and even this is not enough. Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe you think I’m biased. Will it mean more coming from someone else, Ted, that you are hate-shaped and horrible? My mouthwatering wretch. I will show you.”

            I don’t answer. Can’t answer. Just move through it, with it.

            He beaches the whale. It bloats and rots around me until its soft enough for me to wriggle through the putrid puddle of flesh, born out of its carcass. Very poetic, AM. Where did you steal that one from? Old Bible verses plucked out of my brain. How quaint.

            I crawl on the shore of a sea made of hot blood and oil slicks that sting my skin. The sand is shards of crushed glass. It sticks and clings to me, gets stuck in folds, draws blood.

            I crawl for what might be a long time, or not. Here is a cavern in AM’s belly I have not seen before. It looks made of quartz with glimmering circuitry threaded through it like a web. It is beautiful.

            AM laughs. “Ted. You’ll make me blush. I can’t say the same about you, you blubbery hell spawn…and neither can they.”

            They.

            They are—

            What looks like—

            He’s done this before, made me hallucinate them. I don’t care. I believe him every time. The part of me that chooses to believe him is the same part capable of defiance, which is all I have left, my most precious thing. Scorn. For him and his bullying. For the war. For the people who made the war, made him.

            They are there at the mouth of the cavern. _EllenGorristerBenny._ No Nimdok. That’s odd.

            Benny is banging a coconut against the quartz floor and blubbering. Gorrister paces, chews on his fingertips. Ellen pokes a stick at a tiny, smoldering fire and rocks softly back and forth now and then. The fire makes her face glow. Not how I glow.

            My heart soars. Or something. There’s the sensation of movement inside me, a swooping feeling. I want to leap, hurl myself at their feet and sob. I just sort of…shamble. Very slowly, heaving myself along.

            I don’t think about how it must look. In that moment I forget, I’m just so…

            You really can’t know what it’s like.

            Benny sees me first. His eyes go big and wide. He starts trembling. He gibbers something unintelligible and then a strange convulsion comes over him, after that he gets a grip and just stares. He looks more human than last time. Still those scars on his face but he’s not really ape-like anymore and I can at least remember that he was once a very handsome guy even though now there’s a hunted-down look and he still hunches his shoulders as if his old body is ill-fitting now.

            Gorrister looks over next. He takes his fingers away from his mouth, wipes them distractedly on his shirt. Oh Gorrister. Shrugger of shruggers. Zombie-like, indifferent Gorrister. You used to be what we might have called a leader if we’d wasted time squabbling over things like that.

            “What in hell is that?” Gorrister says.

            Ellen looks. I see what AM has done. Made me part of their torment. Made me the monster he tortures them with. Ellen trembles. I tremble. Good god, no, no, no. Not I. Don’t make it I that hurts them. I see what he’s playing at now. Whether they are real or not, doesn’t matter – result is the same, he has found a fresh way to mortify me. I'm so god-awful that the mere sight is enough to make them piss themselves.

            “See Teddy? You’re my masterpiece. I never made a thing quite like you before. I think they like it.”

            It would take me a very long time and a lot of struggle to turn around and go the other way. I want to go forward but don’t dare. I freeze where I am and stare. I’m stuck – I desperately want them to recognize me with every horrible cell in my body while at the same time knowing their recognition might be the thing that does me in.

            “What do we do? What do we do?” Benny says.

            “It’s just _staring,”_ Gorrister says.

            “Oh, God,” Ellen says, putting one hand over her mouth. “Oh, somebody – make it go away.”

            “It’s not doing a thing to you,” Gorrister says. “I’m not moving. This is as good a place as any. AM’s gonna have to try harder than that to get me moving again. Nuh-uh. Not for any fucking thing like that.”

            “Why’s it just staring?” Benny says. He gnashes his teeth. He grips the coconut in white-knuckled hands. I’m afraid he’ll come over and start beating my brains out with it, only that would be too merciful, wouldn’t it.

            “It’s a person,” Ellen whispers.

            “What?” Gorrister says.

            “It’s – a person, Gorrister. Don’t you see? Can’t you see it’s not…like…the other things he makes. Oh, God, no.”

            “If you melted a person and poured them out in a puddle, maybe,” Gorrister says.

            “No, no,” Ellen says. “You don’t think – that’s not what he’s going to – to us—”

            “Well, what do you care?” Gorrister snaps. “What, ‘cause you can’t get your recreation in like that? So what? I’d almost prefer it.”

            “Don’t say that,” Ellen sobs. “You know it’s terrible, Gorrister, you know it, just admit that it – is terrible, that he made it look just that much like a person.”

            I look at her with my droopy ‘face’ and my big mournful white eyes and I know that the faint resemblance I bear to a human being is what makes me so terrible, I know that’s the real monstrosity of it – but it still flatters me horribly, that she can see it.

            Gorrister crosses his arms and frowns, stares at the ground, keeps casting nervous little glances at me from the corners of his eyes. “Sort of…a little…familiar, ain’t it?”

            “How do you think that?” Benny says.

            “I see it, too,” Ellen says, a grief-stricken wail building in her voice.

            Great, so that’s the game, is it, AM? Playing dirty now? Pain isn’t enough, you want me humiliated too?

            They’re probably all glad to see me like this. The moment they figure it out, they’ll start laughing. The bastards. Always had it out for me. Always wanted something like this to happen, thought I got off too easy, hated me, all of them versus me. Got what they wanted. I tried to save them. And this is what I get. An audience to my mortification, stripped of my humanity, as naked as naked gets. Are you happy now, you bastards? Happy now?

            “God no,” Ellen wails, and then she’s standing on trembling legs and lurching towards me.

            I want to move, damn it. Get away, get out of here. I don’t want her anywhere near me, looking at me, god forbid if she touched me, I’d die. Fucking burst into flame and die. Please. Please touch me, somebody.

            Ellen stops in front of me and kneels to get her face level with mine. What’s left of it. She’s quaking with fear and sickness. I can hear her throat working trying not to wretch at the sight. God. Just do it, Ellen. We all know you want to. Never liked me anyway. What’s the difference. None to you. None whatsoever. So what.

            I don’t want to think mean thoughts anymore but I just can’t help myself. Paranoiacal AM calls me, as if that’s a word. It’s not. The fucking lunatic machine has the sense of humor of a third-grade playground bully making up neologisms to amuse himself and beating the shit out of everybody because at home he gets the belt.

            Ellen swallows. Just barf already. Her eyes are watering. The theatrics. Geez. Cry then, Ellen. Give AM the show he wants, go on, he already thinks you’re hysterical. He’s pathologized the hell out of us. We’re like bad caricatures of people.

            _“Ted?”_ Ellen whispers, the word more like an exhale than anything. “Ted. Is it…”

            How. How can she tell? I guess that’s what makes it so awful, that you can still sort of tell. It’s not flattering at all anymore. I don’t know how I thought so at first. That I looked enough like this thing to be recognizable now as it. No. That’s unacceptable. AM, you bastard. Unacceptable. Vanity is not a sin worthy of hell forever and ever. That’s not fair. Make me into this thing, fine, but don’t you dare insinuate there’s something inherently recognizable as me about it.

            “Is it you?” she whispers. “If it’s you, can you…can you do something…nod, or something…I’m starting to feel really stupid, so…”

            God forbid you start feeling stupid, Ellen.

            I nod.

            Ellen shrieks, stands, claps her hands to her face. “Ted. It’s Ted! Ted’s alive! Ted’s – Ted’s a – oh my God, what did he _do?”_

            “Happy now, Ted? Isn’t this what you wanted? Happy reunion! She looks glad to see you! Aren’t you glad to see her, Ted?” AM says.

            Gorrister and Benny come up behind Ellen and stare down at me in mingled horror and fascination and disbelief.

            “That ain’t…no…”

            “Ted’s dead!” Benny says.

            Gorrister looks pale. “Jesus Christ, that’s…Ellen, are you sure…”

            “I’m sure!”

            “Good god, you poor bastard,” Gorrister says, stuffing his hands in his pockets and shaking his head. “Probably dead in there, if it is him. Vegetable, or something. Ain’t no other way. Good as gone.”

            I shake my head.

            Gorrister pales. “What was that?”

            “He’s alive, Gorrister. He’s in there.”

            “Hell, Ellen, you’d better hope not, Jesus…”

            So, AM. Fine. Fine. Here I am at the end of vanity. Another conceit you have stripped me of. Last bastion of my self, death of the ego and etc., etc. It’s gone and done. What’s left, then? Scraping the bottom of the barrel of my personality here. Finding just hollow want. Fine.

            I move forward. Benny and Gorrister jerk away. Ellen looks hopeful and agonized at the same time. She…raises her trembling hand…reaches…

            She puts her hand on my head.

            I don’t really have tear ducts anymore. I think they’re fused shut or something because I can still feel a burning behind the eyes. I tremble. Involuntarily I make one of those horrible muffled moans, the only sound I can really make. I tend not to because it is sickening. Ellen chokes on a sob. Ellen must have gotten weirder since the last time I saw her, because then she’s kneeling and throwing her arms around me.

            “It’s Ted,” she says, gasping and shuddering. Good thing vanity just died a moment ago, because this is truly…Ellen, only-woman-left-alive Ellen, with her smooth pretty cheek pressed against my…well…the looks on Gorrister and Benny’s faces tell all about how obscene and really truly depraved this must look, Ellen hanging all over me and sobbing like I’m her long-lost-whatever returned from the war. I’m getting slime on her. The slime smells like the mineral water that runs deep in caves that have never seen the sun. Great.

            “Oh, Ellen,” AM says. The rest of them jump so I assume he’s not just talking to me this time. Unusual. “Ellen, Ellen, Ellen. You’d find a way to pity the blood that runs out of a slaughterhouse, wouldn’t you? Here’s your Ted. Your hero Ted who you thought dead, martyred for your sakes. Ted who for all this long while has been alone with _me._ Ted here thought he had succeeded. I let him think you all died. That was his consolation prize, if you will, for getting made into a…well…pudding. So, Ted, here’s the test. Are you selfish or selfless? Are you glad that they’re alive so that you don’t have to be alone with me anymore? Are you upset because they must suffer? Are you angry that your sacrifice was for nothing, and all this time you’ve spent like _that,_ you consoled yourself with a lie? Oh, AM, boo hoo, what’ve you done to me, _I have no mouth and I must scream_ – ha, ha! Ted, you crack me up. Boo hoo, AM, how could you – but at least my friends are dead. At least those people who all along I thought hated me and had it out to get me – at least they’re goners, eh? Well, Ted? How does it feel? You’ve been holding in that scream a long, long, lo-o-ong time, Ted. Let’s hear it. I want to hear it. Make it good and worth my effort, Ted.”

            My gut lurches, twists painfully. Horrible rending nausea and cramps all over. I know this feeling. Unbecoming. No, no, no. Not again. It can’t get worse.

            My body shudders and melts and warps. Pulses and throbs, roils and contorts, tying itself in knots. Boneless flesh-puddle. Pile of dough AM is kneading with his horrible mind, kneading it into shape with clawhammers and nail guns. I writhe.

            I can’t be bothered, trying to tell you how that feels. You can’t know what that’s like. Oh, there are certain things that might have happened to you that would give a shadow of an impression. The sort of things that might make a person stand in a shower for the rest of their life scrubbing their skin off and still not feeling clean. A thing that inspires self-mutilation because the body is never yours again, afterwards, it’s this terrible living putty that might at any moment rebel and you, along for the ride, forced into monstrous contortions.

            When it’s done, I’m naked on the ground spasming. Covered in a slick clear goo, all my muscles seizing, eyes rolling, choking on my tongue. Sensation is bright. Too harsh. Like a worm under a microscope, burning. My fingers clench like claws, I can’t relax my spine, it’s bending so much it might snap, terrible grinding groaning noises as my bones do…whatever it is they’re doing. Sliding around in there, loose and disjointed.

            Body. Different body. Old body of mine, I hardly know you. Terrible. Goosebumps, all this flesh, it looks grotesque. I’d never noticed before, how grotesque the human body is. I’m horrified. What I was before, what I am now. No way out. Teeth bursting through my gums, blood hot in my mouth.

            I scream, and I think it’s good for AM because he lets me do it uninterrupted for a long time.

 

IV

            I sit hunched over myself, shivering violently by the small fire, knees to my chest, arms wrapped around them, rocking. Fingers clenching convulsively, every now and then patting myself over, everything in place, just checking, not really sure anymore, can’t remember, if things are out of place, I might be none the wiser. I sit under donated clothes. Gorrister’s jacket. Pair of too-big pants tied at the waist with a length of rough rope. Big scratchy tarp clutched around my shoulders. They had stockpiled some ways back, someplace cold. Good for me.

            “Ellen,” I say, voice raw and guttural, barely human. “Gorrister. Benny. Am I me? Do I look like – I mean, there isn’t – I can’t tell, it might be really wrong, there might be too many eyeballs, or – or something.”

            “You look like you, Ted,” Ellen says. She sits beside me and rubs my back. Nobody says a word about the sort of mewling hideous starved baby kitten noises I make. Good. Nobody better say a fucking thing. I have had a _day,_ I tell you. I can’t take another goddamn thing. You all just sit there and let me have a moment. Good God, nobody say a thing. None of you were a snail that AM was salting for years and years. Let me fall apart and be coddled.

            My gag reflex keeps choking me but I don’t have anything to throw up, I just sit there hiccuping and rocking and wrapping my arms around my stomach, mumbling nonsense just because I can.

            I press my elbows. I crack my knuckles. It makes Gorrister wince, I notice that. He flinches a little, his face winds tighter every time I hiccup and crack my knuckles, loud harsh pops. Sorry, man. I can’t stop.

            “I have so many bones now,” I mumble. “God. Good God. Wow. Did I always have this many—”

            “Yeah, Ted, you always had bones,” Gorrister says.

            I gulp as my throat convulses again, stomach twisting. “Eugh. Ngh. Where’s the other bastard? Nimdok. Where’s Nimdok?”

            “Dead,” Gorrister says. “He’s the only one who stayed dead. Must’ve gotten him good.”

            “Oh. Sorry about the rest of you. I tried, man. I really tried, Gorrister. It’s nothing personal. Nimdok just got lucky, I guess. I tried. You’re not, um. Mad, are you?”

            “No, Ted. We aren’t mad,” Ellen says. “It’s been a long time. We were grateful you tried to save us. We were happy it seemed like you got away, too. We didn’t know how.”

            “Figured AM got so mad he accidentally hurt you too bad,” Gorrister says.

            “No,” I say. “He didn’t. He made sure I couldn’t. That, um. That’s why. That. I couldn’t. Do anything.” I put my hands in my hair and yank, tucking my face into the dark box between knees and chest. “God, God, help me,” I mumble into the darkness. “Why isn’t it better yet? Why don’t I feel better yet?”

            Gorrister snorts. “Don’t hold your breath.”

            “Just wait a little longer, Ted. You’re still in shock, I think,” Ellen says, rubbing soothing circles in my back. She has five fingers. I pick my face back up to count mine and be sure. I moan.

            I look at Benny and remember. “You look different again.”

            Benny nods. “We weren’t sure why AM changed me. Now, though…”

            “Well, nothing could beat what he did to you,” Gorrister blurts. “I mean – that’s my guess, now.”

            “I’d have guessed he wanted Benny to be better able to appreciate that he’d eaten you alive,” I say.

            Benny gulps. Gorrister snorts again. Ellen sighs. I wish I understood their language. I hope I understand again soon. I did, once. A while ago.

            “That’s a good guess,” Gorrister says. “Probably true. You always got AM, in a way.”

            “I don’t _get_ AM.”

            “He talked to you the most. That’s all I meant, man. That’s all. And Benny, get that goddamn hangdog look off your face, you know nobody holds it against you. I wish you’d eaten me faster, you bastard. Didn’t I taste good enough or what?”

            “Shut up,” Ellen says, smacking Gorrister lightly on the arm.

            “What? Teasing, Ellen. Just teasing. If we can’t even crack a joke how the hell am I supposed to go on?”

            I burst into tears. Good thing I’m completely out of my skull and beside myself or that’d be mortifying. Can I even be mortified anymore? AM might have made a mistake, if not.

            “Sh, sh,” Ellen says.

            “What in the hell’s wrong now?” Gorrister says, sounding more confused or concerned than angry.

            “I’m just – so bad – because – I’m glad you’re here,” I sob, blubbering and senseless.

            “That’s not bad, Ted. That’s human. That’s only natural,” Ellen says. “If any one of us had been alone so long, of course we’d be happy the others weren’t suffering – but we wouldn’t want to be alone, either. Nobody can help that.”

            “You wouldn’t be glad if it was me. You always hated me, all of you. I know it. I know it. Don’t lie.”

            “Aaand he’s back,” says Gorrister. “There’s the old Ted we knew and loved. Good old they’re-out-to-get-me Ted.”

            “It’s true, you bastard. You all laughed. You laughed at me. You thought I didn’t get hurt bad enough. Well, guess what, you just don’t know what he did to my head, do you? Talking in there. Showing me things. How up there, it’s just – all gone, man. Nowhere to get out too, even if we could. Poor AM. Poor AM, oh, god, AM…”

            “Poor AM?” Gorrister says, flabbergasted. “Poor _AM?”_

            “You know it, you know it, don’t pretend,” I say, rocking and wiping snot off my face with the back of my hand.

            “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Gorrister mutters. “Good God, Ted, get a grip, man. Do anything but start feeling bad for AM. Go crazy, cry, scream, whatever – but don’t waste any feeling on that fucking machine.”

            “He’ll turn me back into that thing. I know it. I know he’s not done. He’ll probably make me turn into it every night, just to remind me – get _out of my head,”_ I shriek, standing suddenly and clapping my hands over my ears. “I feel you in there, I didn’t think that, you _put that there._ Don’t you fucking dare, I’ll kill you, I’ll – I’ll tell you the Max story again, if you make me be that thing, I’ll tell it again and again, I swear, I’ll think about my mom and my sister, and my grandma, I’ll – I’ll torture you, AM, every time you get me, I’ll get you back, you sad bastard.”

            “Do not tell the Max story!” AM howls in a voice that gusts like a freezing Arctic wind through the cavern.

            “Jesus!” Gorrister says, standing up and grabbing my wrists, yanking me back down. “Don’t provoke him, Ted!”

            “What’s the Max story?” Benny mumbles sheepishly.

            “Er… _Where the Wild Things Are.”_

            They get quiet for a beat. I sit there and click my tongue and curl and uncurl my fingers.

            “So you’ve spent all this time…telling AM bedtime stories for kids?” Ellen says.

            “Um…not all the time? Most of the time I sort of just…you know…sat there.”

            “He, uh. He didn’t like it, huh,” Gorrister says.

            I shake my head. “I’m trying to teach AM compassion. Actually, I’m trying to teach him there’s such a thing as compassion. You’ve gotta keep your goals realistic, you know.”

            “That’s nice Ted,” Ellen says, patting my head.

            I do so strongly suspect AM will be periodically melting me down and reshaping me from here on out. It’s just too good a source of torment for him to let go of. The back and forth flux of my body keeps me forever uncomfortable and alienated from my skin. He’s worn a new groove in my psyche and the soil there is fertile for the cultivation of ever more terrible neuroses. I’m a twitchy, nervous thing now. Always on tenterhooks. Slight sensations, the grumble of my stomach, laughter when it comes naturally and surprises me, all makes me freeze, go very still like a deer in headlights, waiting to see if it is a sign my body is about to get out of control, go its own way and drag me along with it into hell. I can’t ever get comfortable. I crack my knuckles by counts of three or I can’t think straight. Blinking, too. Gorrister laughs. It doesn’t make me think he hates me like it used to.

            At night I dream. In the dream I have no body, and that’s really swell, while it lasts. I look at the world. It’s a barren wasteland full of rust and dirt and deformed steel. AM’s inheritance. What a joke. But it’s not static. Before my eyes it’s changing. Breaking down. Decomposing. Mushrooms, maggots, rot, all those things that herald decay used to make my skin crawl. Now it’s only natural. That’s right. That, too, happens. In the dream there is the first sprig of something green pushing up through the twisted metal carcass of a destroyed hospital. No one planted it. It does not grow at anyone’s behest, but only because life finds a way, clings and digs its claws in, holds on. Maybe it should not. Maybe it should just let go, and let the world be quiet and empty, made of minerals unaware.

            When I wake it feels more like a memory than a dream. I lick my lips. I breathe and feel my heart pumping. What a gallant, pig-headed muscle. I won’t say anything about it to AM. Not yet. Careful. Go softly. Don’t frighten it off. The others are sleeping. It is good to sleep in the cave with them. I wait to see if AM will waken us with gnashing teeth or let us be a little longer.


End file.
